Teachers in Oklahoma and Kentucky massed in their respective state capitols on April 2, to demand GOP legislatures revoke bills damaging to education passed in virtual stealth. The spark plug in Kentucky is a group of activist parents with teachers, #SaveOurSchools Kentucky. In both states the movement has been organized outside the official teachers unions, using social media as well as traditional organizing techniques of talking with colleagues and neighbors about the issues. Another struggle of teachers is simmering, near boil, in Arizona.
Not an April Fool’s joke. Here are the facts: Four days ago (March 29) the ultra-conservative Dean of the Montpellier University Law School was summoned to police headquarters, interrogated, hauled into court, and held over in jail for arraignment by the Chief Prosecutor – all on the complaint of nine student strikers, who claim to have been brutally assaulted with Dean Philippe Pétel’s active complicity while ‘occupying’ a school auditorium.
By: Dan La BotzMarch 25, 2018
A fast, when done in protest, is a call to arms. While eminently non-violent, it is a battle cry, issued in a whisper.
Dan La Botz's article “Trump and the Labor Movement” in the Winter 2018 of New Politics is based on an oral presentation, with the limitations that go with oral presentations. For example, La Botz simplifies the plaintiff’s argument in Janus to the point of missing what is key and unique in it. He states, “The conservatives argue that the union forces workers to financially support political causes with which they may disagree, and so violates their free-speech rights.” This was the issue in the 1977 Abood case.
Amidst an upsurge of militancy among educators in places like West Virginia and the UK, graduate students in the US Midwest carried through the longest strike in University of Illinois history.
For some, the decision to support workers who strike is a given. We defend the right to join a union and exercise the right to strike in every country, as a human right. Defending the rights of workers to organize and withhold their labor when they need to use this weapon is as much a social justice issue as fighting racism, battling sexism, or protecting immigrants from deportation.
By: Jason SchulmanMarch 13, 2018
The call to “arm the teachers” started as another stink bomb President Donald Trump lobbed into the crowd at a conservative rally. But somehow, the concept cycled through the 24-hour news loop and, within a few hours, became a ubiquitous meme. Now, the morally repugnant idea of gun-toting teachers in America’s schools has taken center stage in the nation’s macabre debate on gun safety.
Getting the language right
National City, CA teachers, in a contract fight themselves, show solidarity
As the AFL-CIO holds its day of action across the US, protesting what has been cast as a likely loss in the Janus case, which the Right intends to use to destroy labor and the Left, a movement of school employees in West Virginia is showing organized labor what it means to be a union without the right to strike and without collective bargaining.
A Look Beyond the Immediate Damage
We working people live in darkening times. When the Trump presidency ends in four years—if it does—we may no longer have an organized labor movement. As one of my colleagues, Ed Ott of the Murphy Institute, the City University of New York’s labor school, said to me, “We are at the beginning of the end of the U.S. labor movement based on a partnership with capital.” We are at the twilight of an era. Labor unions and collective bargaining stand to be swept away, and with them the institutions that have sheltered us in the workplace and provided us with a modicum of job security, living wages, health insurance, and pension benefits.
Hands off the metalworkers’ strike in Turkey!
Government ban means AKP despotism serves the bosses!
International solidarity with metalworkers of Turkey!
From October 22nd to the 25th, 2017, the AFL-CIO held its quarto-annual convention in St. Louis, Missouri. The choice of city was, if not intentionally, appropriate.
Reply to Dornbush, Elliott-Negri, and Lewis
Dornbush, Elliott-Negri, and Lewis are right that ideology is not enough and an analysis of “the actual, material terrain” is necessary. Simply repeating the well-known realities of the first-past-the-post U.S. electoral system that favors the two-party duality is not such an analysis. It’s old news. Not altogether wrong, but still yesterday’s political science.
I first met Kim Moody some 50 years ago. He was then organizing chapters of the California-based Peace and Freedom Party as an alternative to the Democratic war machine. If memory serves, he came to Park Slope, Brooklyn, then a predominantly Irish and Italian working-class neighborhood—not the gentrified picture from House Beautiful it has since morphed into—but also inhabited by a smattering of déclassé radicals. Moody wanted to interest a few of us in taking up the electoral mantle.
Some New Politics readers will recognize the title of this article as a paraphrase of Hal Draper’s “Two Souls of Socialism,” which appeared in New Politics in 1966. The first version, however, appeared in the socialist student magazine Anvil in 1960, just as a new generation of youthful activists was emerging, inspired to a large extent by the civil rights movement.
In its January meeting, after a pro-forma discussion, the Delegate Assembly of the UFT (United Federation of Teachers), which still has the legal right to bargain collectively on behalf of New York City's teachers, voted down a resolution to work with community groups to support Black Lives Matter in the schools in February. LeRoy Barr, UFT's assistant secretary, co-staff director, and Chairperson of the Unity Caucus, gave the UFT leadership's rationale for rejecting the motion. Support for BLM was, he contended, a splinter issue, divisive, at a time when the union had to stay focused on what was key, the Janus decision and the threat to collective bargaining rights.
An interview with Steve Early
Mohsen Abdelmoumen: You have written a book about the city of Richmond, California, where you live, prefaced by Senator Bernie Sanders: Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City. This book shows us the experience of this city that has won struggles such as raise the local minimum wage, defeat a casino development project, challenge home foreclosures and evictions, and seek fair taxation of Big Oil and Big Soda. Can we say that the Richmond experience should inspire progressive activists in other cities around the world?
The Janus case before the Supreme Court will deny public employee unions the right to require non-union members to pay their share of the union’s costs to negotiate on behalf of everyone in the bargaining unit.
The #MeToo campaign on social media, women sharing of experiences of sexual harassment, shows how a new generation of women, with male supporters, demands that we examine systemic sexual oppression. We will undoubtedly hear complaints that #Me2 is unwarranted. One predictable trope from the Right is what we heard in response to Trump’s pawing and groping: "These are personal matters, not issues that our society has to address. This is life. Get over it."
For the third time in eight years, public sector workers in Connecticut have voted for concessions. State employees have sacrificed a total of $7 billion to close budget deficits in 2009, 2011, and now 2017.
